Crackpot, p.33
Crackpot, page 33
Perhaps because it had happened so many years ago, and there was a thick, though transparent film of anaesthetizing time over the rawness of the events, Hoda thought often, not so much of what had happened, but of what her duties and her responsibilities should be now, toward the issue of that distant past. When you’re grown up enough in time you should be grown up enough to know. But Hoda didn’t know, couldn’t think straight, was subject to strange gusts and fits of emotion when she tried to think it through, and was reduced, each time, to a placatory gesture, to fill in the meantime. Thus she pacified herself, and tried to overrule the persistent suspicion that in fact some situations are irremediable. Perhaps she was not quite old enough yet, but she was still not completely able to accept the idea, particularly in relation to herself, that there were some things that she might not ever be able to make good.
Often she thought of meeting the boy, of seeing him for the first time, of arranging it, perhaps, so that someone might point him out in the street. Then she might make his acquaintance, as it were, accidentally, and become his friend, and give him things, and take him places, and become a kind of fairy godmother to him. There must be an awful lot of things you could do for a kid like that. There were an awful lot of things she had wanted when she was an adolescent. Sometimes she dreamed it through to the point where she actually told him who she was, or he guessed even, because there was that natural thing between them, that chord that twanged the minute they saw each other; and they both cried an awful lot, Hoda especially, thinking about all those years she had missed and how crazy she was about this kid. What the hell, she wanted to be crazy about him! Sure, and then she’d bring him home, and somehow maybe she’d even be able to explain him to Danile, though she couldn’t think how, and then what? How would she be able to explain herself to him? She was not ashamed, usually. She had done the best she knew how. Maybe she shouldn’t have; well, fat lot of good it did to think that now. Before you knew what it was all about, there you were, enmeshed in your life. But you couldn’t explain that to a kid, and you couldn’t bring him home to it, for fear that maybe, the way he’d grown up, this kind of mother might seem worse than no mother at all. There was nothing wrong with being a whore and being handy when they wanted you; for your allotted moments you were most precious, like a secret idol in a religious rite, yeh, a private ritual men performed to insure their public well being. That was Hoda all right, one of those big, fat idols, all smiles and warm tummy rolls. But afterwards? Everybody knows that idols aren’t real. And the trouble was, a kid, who was brought up to think what everybody else thought, he might hate to discover he was the son of a prostitute, especially after wondering all his life, and maybe being filled with a lot of crap about being the son of a prince, which was really her own fault too.
Even Hoda herself didn’t particularly like that word “prostitute.” She much preferred something like the name Limpy Letz had once coined for her, when they had been discussing how slow business was, and he had suggested that she put up a sign outside, “SEXUAL WORKER. REASONABLE RATES.” That was an honest name, clear and simple, with no built-in contempt. Mr. Polonick had no right to think she was trying to make fun of the revolution when she told him. She was a worker all right. Why is one kind better than another? Sometimes she suspected there was something profoundly snobbish and intolerant about him. And if Polonick was fallible, what of an ignorant young boy who knew nothing of the world? He had probably dreamed of an altogether different kind of mother. No, getting in touch with him just like that was out. The only way she could approach the kid was if she gave up her profession, if she changed her life entirely, if she got married, for instance.
Ha ha ha. Who would have her? She was practically an old maid already anyway, and though she had never entirely given up the habit of hoping, she knew better. And even if someone turned up who actually wanted her, what kind of guy would he be, someone who wanted everybody’s warmed-over leftovers? She might joke about how old spaghetti that’s aged in its sauce for a while is five times as good as the freshly cooked stuff, and a lot of her friends might agree with her, otherwise why would they come so often? But they nearly all wanted their own personal plateful, that they kept tucked away at home, to be fresh at the start.
What would happen if she did get married and suddenly sprang a grown son on her husband? If she was going to give the kid a home at last it was going to be a decent home. She wasn’t going to let any step-father mistreat her kid, that’s for sure. Twist and turn though she might, Hoda couldn’t find a foolproof solution that would be good and let her be good at the same time. She only got herself upset and sometimes was even unnecessarily irritable with Daddy as a result, and ended up by bringing on one of those attacks, those fearful impulses of flight towards her past that she was so afraid she would one night give way to, and run raving through the streets. At ordinary times, when she was in control of herself, she knew very well that the last thing in the world she wanted to do was go near the orphanage. Sometimes, when she read in the Yiddish paper that a fund-raising tea or an open house was being held there, and everyone was invited to come, she would have a momentary vision of herself with a whole crowd of tea-drinking ladies chatting amiably all around her, chatting and chatting, and Hoda too opening her mouth. But all that came out was scream after scream after scream. What would happen if she actually went, if she actually sat among the teacups and suddenly, into the warmth and the cosiness and the good feeling toward orphans that they were all brewing and sipping together she cried out that she was the one, that she was the mother who had abandoned the son! What would happen? Would they go on drinking and chatting and offering tea? No, that was more like every day, when you screamed silently and unheard among them. What then? Would they support her tenderly, on either side, and lead her, weeping, with soothing utterance to comfort her groans, cringing and ashamed and in hope, to some glad confrontation she could hardly visualize? Or would they, after small reflection, unsurprised, lead her to where the accounts were, day by day, of what it had cost them these many years, all her fears neatly added up in dollars and cents. No, not neatly; she knew that much about the way the place was run nowadays.
If it were only a question of money, what need was there for her to reveal herself and put herself at their mercy? On those nights, when no customers had come, and she had been maybe rude to Daddy over something, she couldn’t even remember what; afterwards, all kinds of tags and fragments of thought would begin to jostle each other in her mind. And by now she could recognize when it was beginning to come over her, that let-go-inside feeling that was a prelude to panic fear, that humming in her nerves, the building up of the desire to run madly through forbidden streets.
She had a crazy fantasy that kept tempting her. Suppose she were to re-enact all her movements of that long-ago night? Only backwards. Suppose she were to leave the house, walking backwards, in the night; suppose she hurried backwards through the lanes and alleys and along the hedges and fences and across the lamplight islands of momentary yellow in the dark, moving jerkily and hastily backwards as though drawn against her will, retracing inside-out her steps of long ago. She might be able, that way, somehow to erase her earlier path, negating what had been, nullifying the past, rolling it up out of existence and finding at last that it had never been. Of course she didn’t believe such nonsense. But if it brought relief you didn’t have to worry about believing it. What did it matter, when her stripped-down nerves began to vibrate and hum and shrill and in a minute, any minute now she would no longer be capable of caring what she believed? What was believing anyway? At last, to ease the storming of her nerves, she worked out a formula for flight. She found a reason to retrace her steps, with all secrecy, in the night.
That first time she actually did try to fulfill the fantasy, waiting till she was absolutely sure Daddy must be asleep, and inching backwards, because she wasn’t sure whether she was allowed, by the formula, to glance behind, feeling her way along the wall, out of her bedroom, back along to the summer kitchen door, groping it open behind her, backing out of the summer kitchen, dropping down because she was afraid she might slip and fall and make a noise, on all fours crawling ignominiously backward down the summer kitchen steps, rising and edging around by the side of the house, and having come round front, standing at last on the path, facing the house, and moving back along the long walk toward the gate with something of more confidence in her retrograde steps, but as she moved, seeing suddenly the dead, still, darkened house looming up in front of her out of the night like some not quite substantial apparition, seeing it from without herself, all cock-eyed, all unreal, like some grotesque vision of her own existence, severed from herself, and for one endless moment, while she hesitated in her backward movement, unable to tell for certain whether she was still inside there or standing out here staring at a separate existence that she could not comprehend and that did not comprehend her either. She, who had experienced at times an electrifying sense of the unity of beings, now felt the jagged chill of dislocation, of separation even of herself from herself.
It was fear that in the end made her give up the attempt to move backwards along her earlier route, rational fear, fear of falling, of being seen and carted off to the loony bin, and underlying the rational fear, the fear of moving back even further out of herself, out of her world, out of her mind, into a world of gesture, of a gestural code that suggested itself but did not explain itself any more than what she knew as her rational world was ultimately explicable to her.
Backwards wouldn’t help, she told herself suddenly, sharply, and realized that she had been standing and staring at the house for ages. Backwards! What was the matter with her, was she crazy or something? She had actually got down on her hands and knees and crawled backwards down the back steps! What a nut! It wasn’t even really backwards anyway, if you were going to be accurate about it. To roll it all back you’d have to start out at the orphanage, in the night, and pick up a baby off the porch, and move back down the steps with the bundle in your arms, and all along the haunted streets, and up the back steps, and put it down, and out to the shed, and pick up the filthy pallet, and backwards up the steps again, and put it on the bed, and then how did it go? What were the exact steps? You’d have to get them all in the exact order, inside out, and spread your legs, and even your gasping and groaning would have to roll themselves up inside out, and the thing would have to shove its way back up, and anyway, could you roll up just that fragment without having to roll up also everything that had happened to you and to him and to everyone since that time? And even if you could possibly do all that, would that eradicate it? Or would it be like in the movies, all neatly packaged up and ready to play itself again, after the projectionist has, just for fun, shown you the film running backwards while he’s rewinding it. No, backwards wouldn’t help, but a forward gesture, no matter how little it really meant, at last brought temporary ease. That was why she became so anxious always to have a little money put by, so that she should not be caught without a means to relieve herself, on those occasions when she could no longer fight down her impulse to flight. At such times, instead of clinging to her pillow as before, she arose from her bed, dressed, prepared the envelope, slipped once again out of the house, and sped forward in fear through the eerie night, along the dreaded route, to make the secret, propitiatory gesture which brought relief.
As a result of Hoda’s occasional night-time errands, many years after the foundling was deposited on the orphanage porch, many silent years after, mysterious envelopes, addressed simply to “The Director,” began to appear, at irregular intervals, in the orphanage mail box. Each envelope contained some cash, and a note wrapped around it, on which was printed neatly, FOR THE PRINCE. The sum was never large enough to rekindle the kind of excited speculation that had first been rife regarding the boy’s parentage, but the note and the gesture were enough to arouse old curiosities somewhat, and remind his guardians of the puzzle of his identity.
TEN
Not long after his Bar Mitzvah, old man Popoff called David into the office, and after a lot of crapple crapple crapple about now he was a man and capable of understanding, he showed him the envelopes with the money and the notes, FOR THE PRINCE, all identical, and printed nicer than he could have done, but telling him nothing. He stared dumbly at them for a long time, while Ralphie’s old man crappled on like he was reading a book, about rational appraisal indicating, and paltry sums. He resented that about paltry sums, because they didn’t look so paltry to him, and they were his, and why should they run down what was his? Old Popoff was in no hurry to hand him over his paltry sums, but put them back in their envelopes with their notes and put the elastic band back around them and they disappeared somewhere in that junk heap that was his desk. You could tell Tizey never got a look into this room. She’d go off her chump.
Popoff was sure that he, David, agreed that they should put the money aside till such time as something really important came along to spend it on. He himself was in favour of buying tools with it, when David was ready to learn a trade. David agreed with nothing, but said nothing. He wasn’t going to let anybody know what he felt or how he felt, which wasn’t very hard because he felt nothing at all, except that when Popoff went on and on, his voice, filled with sympathy, crawled over David’s skin like worms, and he wanted to yell at him to shut up, goddam, shut up! when he didn’t even dislike the old guy. He just wanted to get out of there, that’s all. Wherever he was, he always wanted to get out of there fast. Something might be happening, somewhere, something that might be very important to him, if he was there. You never know. That was practically his motto, “You never know.”
He wasn’t interested in the money, anyway, not at first. He had his paper route. And his life outside. Mostly he only slept and ate here, and things were the way he wanted them, for now. No one dared call him Pipick anymore, except Tizey, when she forgot, and Tizey didn’t matter. Sometimes inside of himself he thought Pipick, or Prince Pipick, when he was feeling particularly like an arsehole. But to the guys he was David, and sometimes the Prince. Why not? And the small fry called him King David. Okay; he was the oldest of the real orphans, and the only really mysterious one. And he looked after them when he was around, like, he knew what they felt like.
Mr. Limprig had always called him David, and still did. He was surprised anew each time went to see him, what a little, scrunchled-up old man the Director was growing into. David was way taller than him already, even before he was thirteen. He never stayed long; they didn’t have much to say to each other. But Mr. Limprig always asked him, “Is there anything I can do for you?” before he left. And David always said, “No. Is there anything I can do for you?” Mr. Limprig glanced him a funny, open look for an instant, and shook his head. Afterwards, it always seemed to Pipick that it was that glance he had come for.
One day, when he’d just come out of Mr. Limprig’s office, an old man grabbed him by the arm and asked him in Yiddish, “Boy, how old are you?” And when David replied, the old man said, “You want to do a good deed? Go with this man to his synagogue. They’re short a tenth man; somebody died; it’ll be a double mitzvah if you go.”
Afterwards, the old men had made much of him, and asked him questions about himself, and had oho-ed and ahaed when he’d told them who he was and where he lived, and they had recalled in detail and with a great deal of incidental argument all kinds of things about him that he himself had known only in the vaguest way, because the stories and rumours he had heard had always been vague, and filtered through the minds of children. Sometimes Tizey said something when she was in a good mood, about what he had been like when he was a baby, but she refused to discuss what she called “all the other silly gossip.” She always said, whenever he pestered her, that he should be glad that he was sound of limb and healthy and that he should look after the good inheritance of mind and body that had been bequeathed him, crapple crapple.
But when the old men talked he realized how famous he had been, and when they ended by inviting him to be their spare man, the pisher at their minyan, he accepted. From then on he hung around the synagogue a lot, helping out and celebrating with them on Holy Days and ushering in the Bride of the Sabbath with herring and wine, and trying always to be on hand at prayers, in case one of the congregation, as so often happened, should have an urge to make water, and by absenting himself to pish, should short-hand the minyan. Of course, the more refined among the old men didn’t use the expression “pisher,” and were a bit apologetic when the others did, but David could take a joke.
For quite a while he was remarkably diligent in his voluntary duty, though the Old House was not the closest synagogue to the orphanage, and afterwards he had to rush to deliver his papers. But the old men praised him extravagantly, and he went about with the rare happiness of being conscious of his own virtue and conscious that others were conscious of it too.
The congregation was much impressed by the piety and sense of responsibility of the foundling son, and dredged up instances from the Holy Works of like special cases who had been mysteriously introduced among the people, to perform eventually feats especially assigned from heaven. Word got around to some of the other synagogues in the neighbourhood that the Old House was particularly lucky in having rather a remarkable pisher nowadays, that very selfsame little foundling who had once turned the whole town upside down, now grown a very pious Jew. Naturally, the case was somewhat exaggerated at times, and one version even had it that the boy showed a wisdom, and a grasp of the Holy Works far beyond his years, had discovered a Vocation for the rabbinate, and was beyond doubt on his way to becoming somebody extraordinary. Nor did those who began to come to see for themselves, visitors from other synagogues, who saw that the young boy stood innocuously praying like everyone else, do anything to diminish these rumours. They returned home to their own synagogues shaking their heads and prophesying, “This will be a Gaon, a wise man to teach wise men, a blessed genius!”
Often she thought of meeting the boy, of seeing him for the first time, of arranging it, perhaps, so that someone might point him out in the street. Then she might make his acquaintance, as it were, accidentally, and become his friend, and give him things, and take him places, and become a kind of fairy godmother to him. There must be an awful lot of things you could do for a kid like that. There were an awful lot of things she had wanted when she was an adolescent. Sometimes she dreamed it through to the point where she actually told him who she was, or he guessed even, because there was that natural thing between them, that chord that twanged the minute they saw each other; and they both cried an awful lot, Hoda especially, thinking about all those years she had missed and how crazy she was about this kid. What the hell, she wanted to be crazy about him! Sure, and then she’d bring him home, and somehow maybe she’d even be able to explain him to Danile, though she couldn’t think how, and then what? How would she be able to explain herself to him? She was not ashamed, usually. She had done the best she knew how. Maybe she shouldn’t have; well, fat lot of good it did to think that now. Before you knew what it was all about, there you were, enmeshed in your life. But you couldn’t explain that to a kid, and you couldn’t bring him home to it, for fear that maybe, the way he’d grown up, this kind of mother might seem worse than no mother at all. There was nothing wrong with being a whore and being handy when they wanted you; for your allotted moments you were most precious, like a secret idol in a religious rite, yeh, a private ritual men performed to insure their public well being. That was Hoda all right, one of those big, fat idols, all smiles and warm tummy rolls. But afterwards? Everybody knows that idols aren’t real. And the trouble was, a kid, who was brought up to think what everybody else thought, he might hate to discover he was the son of a prostitute, especially after wondering all his life, and maybe being filled with a lot of crap about being the son of a prince, which was really her own fault too.
Even Hoda herself didn’t particularly like that word “prostitute.” She much preferred something like the name Limpy Letz had once coined for her, when they had been discussing how slow business was, and he had suggested that she put up a sign outside, “SEXUAL WORKER. REASONABLE RATES.” That was an honest name, clear and simple, with no built-in contempt. Mr. Polonick had no right to think she was trying to make fun of the revolution when she told him. She was a worker all right. Why is one kind better than another? Sometimes she suspected there was something profoundly snobbish and intolerant about him. And if Polonick was fallible, what of an ignorant young boy who knew nothing of the world? He had probably dreamed of an altogether different kind of mother. No, getting in touch with him just like that was out. The only way she could approach the kid was if she gave up her profession, if she changed her life entirely, if she got married, for instance.
Ha ha ha. Who would have her? She was practically an old maid already anyway, and though she had never entirely given up the habit of hoping, she knew better. And even if someone turned up who actually wanted her, what kind of guy would he be, someone who wanted everybody’s warmed-over leftovers? She might joke about how old spaghetti that’s aged in its sauce for a while is five times as good as the freshly cooked stuff, and a lot of her friends might agree with her, otherwise why would they come so often? But they nearly all wanted their own personal plateful, that they kept tucked away at home, to be fresh at the start.
What would happen if she did get married and suddenly sprang a grown son on her husband? If she was going to give the kid a home at last it was going to be a decent home. She wasn’t going to let any step-father mistreat her kid, that’s for sure. Twist and turn though she might, Hoda couldn’t find a foolproof solution that would be good and let her be good at the same time. She only got herself upset and sometimes was even unnecessarily irritable with Daddy as a result, and ended up by bringing on one of those attacks, those fearful impulses of flight towards her past that she was so afraid she would one night give way to, and run raving through the streets. At ordinary times, when she was in control of herself, she knew very well that the last thing in the world she wanted to do was go near the orphanage. Sometimes, when she read in the Yiddish paper that a fund-raising tea or an open house was being held there, and everyone was invited to come, she would have a momentary vision of herself with a whole crowd of tea-drinking ladies chatting amiably all around her, chatting and chatting, and Hoda too opening her mouth. But all that came out was scream after scream after scream. What would happen if she actually went, if she actually sat among the teacups and suddenly, into the warmth and the cosiness and the good feeling toward orphans that they were all brewing and sipping together she cried out that she was the one, that she was the mother who had abandoned the son! What would happen? Would they go on drinking and chatting and offering tea? No, that was more like every day, when you screamed silently and unheard among them. What then? Would they support her tenderly, on either side, and lead her, weeping, with soothing utterance to comfort her groans, cringing and ashamed and in hope, to some glad confrontation she could hardly visualize? Or would they, after small reflection, unsurprised, lead her to where the accounts were, day by day, of what it had cost them these many years, all her fears neatly added up in dollars and cents. No, not neatly; she knew that much about the way the place was run nowadays.
If it were only a question of money, what need was there for her to reveal herself and put herself at their mercy? On those nights, when no customers had come, and she had been maybe rude to Daddy over something, she couldn’t even remember what; afterwards, all kinds of tags and fragments of thought would begin to jostle each other in her mind. And by now she could recognize when it was beginning to come over her, that let-go-inside feeling that was a prelude to panic fear, that humming in her nerves, the building up of the desire to run madly through forbidden streets.
She had a crazy fantasy that kept tempting her. Suppose she were to re-enact all her movements of that long-ago night? Only backwards. Suppose she were to leave the house, walking backwards, in the night; suppose she hurried backwards through the lanes and alleys and along the hedges and fences and across the lamplight islands of momentary yellow in the dark, moving jerkily and hastily backwards as though drawn against her will, retracing inside-out her steps of long ago. She might be able, that way, somehow to erase her earlier path, negating what had been, nullifying the past, rolling it up out of existence and finding at last that it had never been. Of course she didn’t believe such nonsense. But if it brought relief you didn’t have to worry about believing it. What did it matter, when her stripped-down nerves began to vibrate and hum and shrill and in a minute, any minute now she would no longer be capable of caring what she believed? What was believing anyway? At last, to ease the storming of her nerves, she worked out a formula for flight. She found a reason to retrace her steps, with all secrecy, in the night.
That first time she actually did try to fulfill the fantasy, waiting till she was absolutely sure Daddy must be asleep, and inching backwards, because she wasn’t sure whether she was allowed, by the formula, to glance behind, feeling her way along the wall, out of her bedroom, back along to the summer kitchen door, groping it open behind her, backing out of the summer kitchen, dropping down because she was afraid she might slip and fall and make a noise, on all fours crawling ignominiously backward down the summer kitchen steps, rising and edging around by the side of the house, and having come round front, standing at last on the path, facing the house, and moving back along the long walk toward the gate with something of more confidence in her retrograde steps, but as she moved, seeing suddenly the dead, still, darkened house looming up in front of her out of the night like some not quite substantial apparition, seeing it from without herself, all cock-eyed, all unreal, like some grotesque vision of her own existence, severed from herself, and for one endless moment, while she hesitated in her backward movement, unable to tell for certain whether she was still inside there or standing out here staring at a separate existence that she could not comprehend and that did not comprehend her either. She, who had experienced at times an electrifying sense of the unity of beings, now felt the jagged chill of dislocation, of separation even of herself from herself.
It was fear that in the end made her give up the attempt to move backwards along her earlier route, rational fear, fear of falling, of being seen and carted off to the loony bin, and underlying the rational fear, the fear of moving back even further out of herself, out of her world, out of her mind, into a world of gesture, of a gestural code that suggested itself but did not explain itself any more than what she knew as her rational world was ultimately explicable to her.
Backwards wouldn’t help, she told herself suddenly, sharply, and realized that she had been standing and staring at the house for ages. Backwards! What was the matter with her, was she crazy or something? She had actually got down on her hands and knees and crawled backwards down the back steps! What a nut! It wasn’t even really backwards anyway, if you were going to be accurate about it. To roll it all back you’d have to start out at the orphanage, in the night, and pick up a baby off the porch, and move back down the steps with the bundle in your arms, and all along the haunted streets, and up the back steps, and put it down, and out to the shed, and pick up the filthy pallet, and backwards up the steps again, and put it on the bed, and then how did it go? What were the exact steps? You’d have to get them all in the exact order, inside out, and spread your legs, and even your gasping and groaning would have to roll themselves up inside out, and the thing would have to shove its way back up, and anyway, could you roll up just that fragment without having to roll up also everything that had happened to you and to him and to everyone since that time? And even if you could possibly do all that, would that eradicate it? Or would it be like in the movies, all neatly packaged up and ready to play itself again, after the projectionist has, just for fun, shown you the film running backwards while he’s rewinding it. No, backwards wouldn’t help, but a forward gesture, no matter how little it really meant, at last brought temporary ease. That was why she became so anxious always to have a little money put by, so that she should not be caught without a means to relieve herself, on those occasions when she could no longer fight down her impulse to flight. At such times, instead of clinging to her pillow as before, she arose from her bed, dressed, prepared the envelope, slipped once again out of the house, and sped forward in fear through the eerie night, along the dreaded route, to make the secret, propitiatory gesture which brought relief.
As a result of Hoda’s occasional night-time errands, many years after the foundling was deposited on the orphanage porch, many silent years after, mysterious envelopes, addressed simply to “The Director,” began to appear, at irregular intervals, in the orphanage mail box. Each envelope contained some cash, and a note wrapped around it, on which was printed neatly, FOR THE PRINCE. The sum was never large enough to rekindle the kind of excited speculation that had first been rife regarding the boy’s parentage, but the note and the gesture were enough to arouse old curiosities somewhat, and remind his guardians of the puzzle of his identity.
TEN
Not long after his Bar Mitzvah, old man Popoff called David into the office, and after a lot of crapple crapple crapple about now he was a man and capable of understanding, he showed him the envelopes with the money and the notes, FOR THE PRINCE, all identical, and printed nicer than he could have done, but telling him nothing. He stared dumbly at them for a long time, while Ralphie’s old man crappled on like he was reading a book, about rational appraisal indicating, and paltry sums. He resented that about paltry sums, because they didn’t look so paltry to him, and they were his, and why should they run down what was his? Old Popoff was in no hurry to hand him over his paltry sums, but put them back in their envelopes with their notes and put the elastic band back around them and they disappeared somewhere in that junk heap that was his desk. You could tell Tizey never got a look into this room. She’d go off her chump.
Popoff was sure that he, David, agreed that they should put the money aside till such time as something really important came along to spend it on. He himself was in favour of buying tools with it, when David was ready to learn a trade. David agreed with nothing, but said nothing. He wasn’t going to let anybody know what he felt or how he felt, which wasn’t very hard because he felt nothing at all, except that when Popoff went on and on, his voice, filled with sympathy, crawled over David’s skin like worms, and he wanted to yell at him to shut up, goddam, shut up! when he didn’t even dislike the old guy. He just wanted to get out of there, that’s all. Wherever he was, he always wanted to get out of there fast. Something might be happening, somewhere, something that might be very important to him, if he was there. You never know. That was practically his motto, “You never know.”
He wasn’t interested in the money, anyway, not at first. He had his paper route. And his life outside. Mostly he only slept and ate here, and things were the way he wanted them, for now. No one dared call him Pipick anymore, except Tizey, when she forgot, and Tizey didn’t matter. Sometimes inside of himself he thought Pipick, or Prince Pipick, when he was feeling particularly like an arsehole. But to the guys he was David, and sometimes the Prince. Why not? And the small fry called him King David. Okay; he was the oldest of the real orphans, and the only really mysterious one. And he looked after them when he was around, like, he knew what they felt like.
Mr. Limprig had always called him David, and still did. He was surprised anew each time went to see him, what a little, scrunchled-up old man the Director was growing into. David was way taller than him already, even before he was thirteen. He never stayed long; they didn’t have much to say to each other. But Mr. Limprig always asked him, “Is there anything I can do for you?” before he left. And David always said, “No. Is there anything I can do for you?” Mr. Limprig glanced him a funny, open look for an instant, and shook his head. Afterwards, it always seemed to Pipick that it was that glance he had come for.
One day, when he’d just come out of Mr. Limprig’s office, an old man grabbed him by the arm and asked him in Yiddish, “Boy, how old are you?” And when David replied, the old man said, “You want to do a good deed? Go with this man to his synagogue. They’re short a tenth man; somebody died; it’ll be a double mitzvah if you go.”
Afterwards, the old men had made much of him, and asked him questions about himself, and had oho-ed and ahaed when he’d told them who he was and where he lived, and they had recalled in detail and with a great deal of incidental argument all kinds of things about him that he himself had known only in the vaguest way, because the stories and rumours he had heard had always been vague, and filtered through the minds of children. Sometimes Tizey said something when she was in a good mood, about what he had been like when he was a baby, but she refused to discuss what she called “all the other silly gossip.” She always said, whenever he pestered her, that he should be glad that he was sound of limb and healthy and that he should look after the good inheritance of mind and body that had been bequeathed him, crapple crapple.
But when the old men talked he realized how famous he had been, and when they ended by inviting him to be their spare man, the pisher at their minyan, he accepted. From then on he hung around the synagogue a lot, helping out and celebrating with them on Holy Days and ushering in the Bride of the Sabbath with herring and wine, and trying always to be on hand at prayers, in case one of the congregation, as so often happened, should have an urge to make water, and by absenting himself to pish, should short-hand the minyan. Of course, the more refined among the old men didn’t use the expression “pisher,” and were a bit apologetic when the others did, but David could take a joke.
For quite a while he was remarkably diligent in his voluntary duty, though the Old House was not the closest synagogue to the orphanage, and afterwards he had to rush to deliver his papers. But the old men praised him extravagantly, and he went about with the rare happiness of being conscious of his own virtue and conscious that others were conscious of it too.
The congregation was much impressed by the piety and sense of responsibility of the foundling son, and dredged up instances from the Holy Works of like special cases who had been mysteriously introduced among the people, to perform eventually feats especially assigned from heaven. Word got around to some of the other synagogues in the neighbourhood that the Old House was particularly lucky in having rather a remarkable pisher nowadays, that very selfsame little foundling who had once turned the whole town upside down, now grown a very pious Jew. Naturally, the case was somewhat exaggerated at times, and one version even had it that the boy showed a wisdom, and a grasp of the Holy Works far beyond his years, had discovered a Vocation for the rabbinate, and was beyond doubt on his way to becoming somebody extraordinary. Nor did those who began to come to see for themselves, visitors from other synagogues, who saw that the young boy stood innocuously praying like everyone else, do anything to diminish these rumours. They returned home to their own synagogues shaking their heads and prophesying, “This will be a Gaon, a wise man to teach wise men, a blessed genius!”
